1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to software testing, and more particularly, to methods and systems for parsing test results having diverse formats.
2. Description of the Related Art
Software reliability through software testing continues to be very important in the software development cycle. As is well known, software testing is used to find and eliminate defects (i.e., bugs) in software, which if undetected, can cause the software to operate improperly. Software testing can be conducted by applying test harnesses to software products.
Generally speaking, test harnesses contain test suites. As used herein a test suite is a comprehensive list of test cases (TCs) or data files having commands specifically programmed to initiate a number of functional aspects of the software product being tested. For instance, if the software product being tested is a word processing program, the test suite may activate a spell check command, a cut text command, a paste command, etc. Thus, once the test suite is executed, the test results reveal whether any of the tested commands failed to operate as intended. Test cases can be in different formats. Also as used herein, once submitted for processing, each test case generates a test result. The corresponding test results will be in formats that correspond to that of the test case, and thus can vary across a series of test results. After the test results are generated they must be parsed. Individual parsers are formatted to parse a specific type of test result format. Therefore, it might not be possible to parse all test results with one parser.
Test harnesses can potentially contain more than one type of test case format in a test suite. Therefore, when a test harness is executed the test results will in many cases be of different formats. When parsing is performed on test results of different formats, multiple passes must be made with the different required parsers to parse all of the results. One pass must be made with each parser that corresponds to each different corresponding test result format. This need to perform a series of parsing operations to one set of data from a single test harness increases the time and decreases the efficiency of parsing.
When parsing is done on sets of test results from multiple test suites, each set of test results must be parsed separately, even if the test results across the two sets are all of the same format. The need to parse multiple times increases the time and decreases the efficiency of the parsing process.
In view of the foregoing, there is a need for more efficient systems and methods of parsing test results of diverse formats.